Help With Corrupt SC Card File Problem!

ScottNelson

ScottNelson

Well-known member
(Make that an SDHC Card)

Shot a series of interviews yesterday, down loaded and edited from 32gig Class 10 card with no problem this morning. Took same card out this afternoon and shot r&g b-roll. Set up interview and checked playback for vid and audio - perfect. Shot interview, came back to studio and card not recognized by FCPX. Put card back in cam and 132 scenes showed as "?" question marks. Ran "REPAIR IMAGE DB FILE" in camera and "NO INCONSISTENCIES WERE FOUND".

Put card in iMac and ran Disk Utility and Verify Disk. 12.2 gigs show as valid files on card yet when I double click on "Private" file in "Finder", no scenes show on viewer. Also copied card to 800 firewire drive and still not recognized by any means.

Puzzling problem since card was fine up till last interview. Turned cam off before removing card.

Anyone else have this problem? Solution? Ideas?

I'm stumped which is mild compared to what happens when I tell the client.

Regards,
Scott

(EDIT) Card is a Delkin Devices card that I had with my AF100 and has worked perfectly for a month in the FS700.
 
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ScottNelson said:
(Make that an SDHC Card)

Shot a series of interviews yesterday, down loaded and edited from 32gig Class 10 card with no problem this morning. Took same card out this afternoon and shot r&g b-roll. Set up interview and checked playback for vid and audio - perfect. Shot interview, came back to studio and card not recognized by FCPX. Put card back in cam and 132 scenes showed as "?" question marks. Ran "REPAIR IMAGE DB FILE" in camera and "NO INCONSISTENCIES WERE FOUND".

Put card in iMac and ran Disk Utility and Verify Disk. 12.2 gigs show as valid files on card yet when I double click on "Private" file in "Finder", no scenes show on viewer. Also copied card to 800 firewire drive and still not recognized by any means.

Puzzling problem since card was fine up till last interview. Turned cam off before removing card.

Anyone else have this problem? Solution? Ideas?

I'm stumped which is mild compared to what happens when I tell the client.

Regards,
Scott

(EDIT) Card is a Delkin Devices card that I had with my AF100 and has worked perfectly for a month in the FS700.
Click to expand...

That doesn't sound like a corrupt card. Are all the .MTS files still there? Those are the most important thing. A good test is try playing your .MTS files off the card in VLC. If those work then the footage is there, it just may be that the AVCHD file structure was altered in a way that FCP doesnt fully recognize.

Did you lock the card every time you removed it from the camera and unlock it when you put it back in? Always lock cards, especially if you use a mac. Mac's write lots of hidden files to every storage device they touch without asking you, and I have had this screw up file-based video media in the past. If you are not formatting every time you put a card in your camera, you need to make sure you lock the card any time it is out of the camera to avoid getting your AVCHD file structure corrupted by other devices/computers.
 
nyvz said:
That doesn't sound like a corrupt card. Are all the .MTS files still there?
Click to expand...

All original MTS files disappeared - zap, gone. Strange thing is, I tried recording new shot this morning on troubled card and it works perfectly. Talked to client and re-shooting today with new Class 10, 400x card. Thanks for tip to lock card before putting it in iMac.
 
Well also keep in mind that your files were probably not gone. If files on just about any storage device "disappear" its probably just that they were removed from the filesystem tables, not from the actual physical media. If you do not write over those files, you can probably recover them fairly easily using a program that searches all the blocks for file headers, finding deleted files and files that disappears due to corrupted file tables. This is why the only way to securely erase any storage device is to write over the entire capacity of the device. It sounds like you re-formatted the card and recorded new footage to it, in which case your old videos might now be unrecoverable.

I take comfort in knowing that files generally do not instantaneously disappear from functional media. For a Class 10 32GB SDHC card, for example, which probably only do erase/write functions at about 20MBps, on a healthy card, it actually would take at least 25 minutes of the highest possible speed continuous writing to the card to actually remove the data on the card.
 
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I haven't re-formatted the card. I tried 'Disk Drill Media Recovery' to no avail.
Suggestions for another program??
 
Thank you NYVZ -- I had this exact problem recently and couldn't figure out what happened...until I found your post...

Also discovered that if I dragged the corrupted file off of the card onto my desktop, then removed, re-formatted, and reconnected the card, I could put the corrupted file back on the card and the file would be perfectly usable, thus saving it...Thanks again...
 
Did you use a card reader? Or plugged straight into comp reader? Had an issue with a card reader and a MacBook Pro, corrupted the DB file. Had a company do a data recovery, and they retrieved it all. In the end I think it was the Mac writing files to the DB file and corrupted it.
 
In the year since I posted this I have never had another similar problem - probably because I have never put another SD card in my iMac or MacBookAir without insuring that the write-protect tab is enabled.

Lesson learned: Mac will attempt to write to any unprotected card.

Regards,
Scott
 
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